New Thinking?

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Interesting to note the comments of Victor Fabusola in an article on Hackernoon, that popped into one of my feeds today. In discussing the impending advent of Web 3.0, he references the negatives of the current - Web 2.0 - incarnation of, well, the web. Two things stand out from this: the first and most obvious is his conflating 'the internet' per se, with the web: simply wrong, but an understandable category error, given his obvious youth [compared to me anyway]. The other is his characterization of the motives behind Web 2.0 as being simply pecuniary and essentially one-sided; with user data being siphoned off and centralized by corporations for commercial exploitation.

Yes, those things have been the end result of the implementation of Web 2.0, but its origins and the motives of its innovators, couldn't be further away from this uncomfortable truth. The fact is that Web 1.0 was essentially built for shuffling and sharing documents: a kind of bring-your-own library that was essentially a one-way street: stuff was posted online - and when search was implemented could be found without your needing to be being aware of the exact location of the data you needed - and you read/consumed it. It was that simple. Also, corporate squabbles over protocols - the Browser Wars: the earliest attempts by corporations to monetize the web - effectively broke that simple playground, making it difficult to produce standardized content that everyone could share easily.

Web 2.0 simply sought to introduce a level of interactivity, standardization and democratization to web content, cf. just about anything Jeffrey Zeldman ever wrote or did/does. The problem was that the corporations that had hung back from the web, because of the lack of opportunities for exploitation afforded by the crude nature of the web in its then state, then seized on the new, two-way, affordances that Web 2.0 and its cryptographic developments offered. What started off as a genuine attempt just make the damned system work properly, turned the whole shooting match into a digital Klondike: and here we are in the present day.

Can Web 3.0 decentralize web activity and reduce corporate influence? I somehow doubt it: the web as we know is probably as far advanced as the vested interests will allow it: it is now establishment, and hopes of ever re-democratizing it are vanishingly small: there's simply too much money involved. However, the Internet is a far, far bigger, and mostly un-utilized data space than the relatively tiny, visible World Wide Web, huge as it is. I'm afraid that now it's down to the freedom fighters of the online world to take Tim Berners-Lee's vision of what the web was to be to the next stage, and leave the corporates gasping for breath in their wake. Time to break a brand-new trail, and not just try to re-tarmac the old one...

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